Summit Lecture Series: The Koran says the Bible is right

The Koran says the Bible is right

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Abdu Murray:

Now, this shifted my thinking slightly because John the Baptist’s words, the power of the scripture, don’t forsake the power of the scripture. You’re going to learn a lot of stuff while you’re here at Summit. Let me just tell you something. The scripture is more valuable than anything anybody here will tell you. The scripture is more important than anything else. Let us never speak from empty words and a closed Bible, ladies and gentlemen, don’t do it. I was a skeptic and it touched me. I didn’t convert right then and there, but it touched me. So as we moved on, as I began to see these things, I had a more objective framework in my mind. I began to see, you know what, I’m not going to swallow everything everybody says about Christianity, nor everything people says positive about Islam. I’m going to examine these things a little more objectively now. And that’s when I came across a shocking challenger, a challenger that wrecked my faith.

See, I had believed that the Bible was once God’s word and became changed over time. Okay? The Bible was once God’s word and became changed over time. I thought that the Koran, which I had read numerous times before, taught that. But my faith in what the Koran is and what the Bible is and who Jesus is, my understanding of all that, which rocked, just absolutely shocked by a shocking challenger to my faith. The challenger was shocking because I had actually trusted this challenger with my faith in Islam. I had trusted this challenger with my conduct of life and how I should live and what it meant to follow God. And suddenly this challenger wrecked all that for me. It wasn’t a Christian. It wasn’t a Muslim. It wasn’t a Jew, wasn’t an atheist, wasn’t even a person. It was my Koran. The Koran. The book that I had followed and trusted my life to suddenly changed everything for me.

You see, I had believed that the Bible was once God’s word and became changed over time. I thought the Koran taught that. But then you read the Koran and what it says, you look at chapter five, verse 43 of the Koran. It says, “But how will the Jews come to you..”, meaning Mohammed, “… for judgment when they already have the Torah, which enshrines…”, present tense, “… God’s judgment?” A Muslim takes every word of the Koran seriously. It’s God’s dictated word for heaven’s sake. So it’s perfect in every way. And when he says present tense, it means present tense. If the Torah enshrines God’s judgment at the time of Mohammad, then how did the Koran come to fix it? It enshrines God’s judgment. But there was more. In the same chapter, in chapter five, verse 68 it says, “People of the book…”, which is a euphemism for Christians and Jews, “… you will attain nothing until you observe the Torah and the gospel. And what has been revealed to you from your Lord.”

How are they going to attain something and observe, present tense, once again, the Torah and the gospel if it’s corrupted? It’s been changed. Why would God say, “Go look at it.”? In fact, one translation of this actually says, the words in Arabic are [foreign language 00:02:57] which means, “You are not standing on anything unless you stand on the Torah and the gospel.” These corrupt books? How does that make any sense? Chapter three of the Koran/ I was looking at this, I’m seeing is in a fever pitch now. He has already revealed the Torah and the gospel for the guidance of men; those that deny God’s revelations shall be sternly punished. But here I was denying them. I only punished.

And then this is the one that really rocked me. It’s a direction to the Christians. “Let those who follow the gospel…”, meaning Christians, “… judge according to what God has revealed therein.” And then the verse goes on to say, “And those who do not judge by God’s revelations are the rebellious or the evil doers.” I don’t want to be an evil doer. I don’t want to be rebellious. I have to juggle what God has revealed in the gospel. But the Bible and the Koran don’t agree on so many things. The Koran says that Jesus is not God, that he did not die on the cross, and that he did not raise from the dead. The Bible says all those things. So how am I supposed to understand this? See, this is what Al Gore calls an inconvenient truth. You have something that you want to believe, but it’s contradicted by the things that you have to believe. And you see this tension.

So understand the dilemma here. The Koran says the Bible is right, but the Bible contradicts the Koran, which means the Koran is wrong because it said the Bible was right. You see that? If the Bible was wrong, the Koran is still wrong because it said the Bible was right. So there’s a dilemma there, there’s a problem, a very serious problem. Now I thought to myself, “Okay, maybe I can get out of this loophole. Maybe I can find a loophole out of this.” The Koran says the Bible was once was God’s word. And therefore, it was corrupted over time and the Koran came to fix it. And I started thinking, “Maybe it wasn’t corrupted by the time of the Koran. Maybe the Bible was corrupted after the Koran came. Maybe I can see the evidence for that.” And as you go through and you see the evidence, I began to study it and see, “Maybe there’s a way out of this mess.” When you look at the evidence, the evidence is clear.

The Bible, when you look at the manuscript evidence, 5,838 copies of the New Testament in Greek. Almost 26,000 copies of the New Testament in fragmentary form and other manuscript forms in Greek and other languages. You can reconstruct almost the entire New Testament from the quotations, from the early church fathers up to the 300s. I mean, it is the same, not only since the Koran in seventh century, but for hundreds of years before the Koran in the seventh century. So that door was foreclosed on me. And then I began to see something really important. And it’s this. It’s a dilemma. I saw this dilemma and I couldn’t really see a way around it. See remember, I believe that God is great, right? Allahu Akbar, God is great. He is the greatest possible being. He’s all powerful. And he’s trustworthy. I have to believe that he’s trustworthy, otherwise, if he can lie to me, then basically how could I ever know it?

So if the Bible was corrupted, two things follow. Either god is unable to prevent the corruption or he’s unwilling to prevent the corruption. Either he’s unable or unwilling. If he’s unable to prevent the corruption of scripture, then he’s not all powerful, is he? Because he couldn’t stop it. Surely he could have stopped that. Surely he could have. Are humans stronger than God? If he’s not all powerful, then there’s no certainty about anything he does. How could I know that the Koran wasn’t corrupted? How could I know any of these things? Why would I trust God in any way, shape or form? More importantly this, ladies and gentlemen, if God is not all powerful and able to prevent his scripture from corruption, how was he great? A Muslim can never agree to that side of the dilemma. If God is great, he can’t be impotent to protect his scriptures. The only option, and I’ve looked for three options and there’s not three, I looked for three there’s only two. The other option is God’s unwilling. He could prevent his scriptures from corruption, but he’s unwilling to prevent them from the corruption.

Now, how do you know anything about God? We know things about God from his revealed word. We can know he exists from the general revelation around us, but how do you know he’s a trinity? How do you know what he wants from you? How do you know what he expects from you? How do you know what he does for us, other than through his divine revelation, his special revelation, which is his scripture? But God is unwilling to protect the only means by which we know him, by letting it fall into such disrepair, that it contains horrible blasphemies that will damn you to hell? He lets that go for 600 years before Muhammad arrives on the scene?

If that’s the case, if God is unwilling then God is not trustworthy. If God is not trustworthy then how could you have any certainty whatsoever about his revelation? How can you know that the Koran wasn’t corrupted? If he could allow the Bible to be corrupted, why not the Koran? See the problem here? I wanted to believe in a God who was great, but Islam’s teaching that the Bible was changed doesn’t allow for that. It does not allow for him to be truly great. And I wanted him to be great. Now I’m going to skip ahead.

See I began to see all this evidence. But I realized something; this would require me as I began to see the authenticity of the Bible and not just what it says, but events that happened in it, like Jesus’ resurrection, his crucifixion and all these things. I began to see this stuff. I began to see this is historically verifiable. And I didn’t like it one bit. Not one bit. Because I didn’t want it to be true. See, I knew something. Somewhere inside of me, not consciously, but somewhere inside me, I knew that if I did this, if I believed in this gospel, I would stand at the edge of a cliff and throw myself off. The identity I once had would be over. I would be committing a suicide of sorts. I would be committing that suicide. I would be betraying culture, my identity, my family, everything. This had better be right. And even then I didn’t want to be right.

Because ladies and gentlemen, this is the fact, the answers are not hard to find. The answers are hard to accept. They’re not hard to find, they’re hard to accept. So-

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